Joe, Cancer, Covid

Joe is out of the hospital but still in misery.  He fell a few days ago and now has intense pain in his leg and groin.  He still has a bag outside his hip collecting urine and apparently a pad that soaks up blood clots leaking from his bladder.

He says food tastes like metal.  One small can of Ensure and V-8 juice are all he can manage in a day.  And there’s the other humiliating problem: constipation.  He needs laxatives, and Renee has to clean up the mess. My delicate, 90-lb. sister has stepped up like a trooper, refusing to let anyone else take over this most intimate of tasks.
 

The two of them are alone in the midst of COVID.  No one else is allowed in the house.  I am far away and helpless and already grieving. 

A few years ago, my 22-year-old cat OJ started having seizures that left her drooling and unresponsive.  In between, she would stand facing a corner of the room for hours.  When I took her to the vet, we both sat on the floor with OJ.  Dr. Hanson offered a range of tests and treatments.  Then she peered at me,  noted the tears rolling down my cheeks.  It’s my job to offer whatever I can to keep her alive as long as possible, she said, but it may not be what you want.  I looked at OJ.  No treatments, I said.  I knew it was time.

I think medical doctors have the same belief.  But I don’t want them to offer false hope, offer therapies that will only prolong a painful and humiliating decline.  I want him to forego these treatments and enter hospice, receive massive doses of morphine or opioids or whatever will leave him floating on a cloud of drug-induced bliss, or at least free of pain.  I want him to die in the way and at the time he desires, not in the terrible solitude dictated by Covid, but surrounded by loving family, and in full possession of himself.